Authors: Margaret Irwin
Among her friends, in the clean sea-winds and frosty sunshine, she could almost believe it as she swung her golf club and sent the ball flying over the green sheep-nibbled turf. Her eyes began to lose
their haunted look: there were even moments when she was wildly gay and quite forgot the world outside all round her, the forces that were making history, indifferent to her fate.
She was soon reminded. She had to go back at times to Edinburgh to receive the envoys from other countries, to listen to their shocked condolences and know that they were watching avidly for any signs of guilty conscience. For Catherine de Medici had at once expressed her conviction that her former daughter-in-law had been at the bottom of the crime, and would have dissolved the Scottish Guard in France in token of her virtuous indignation, had her son Charles allowed it. Du Croc, now in Paris, wrote to warn Mary that she was being ‘wrongously calumniated’, and to beg her to take speedy and furious vengeance in proof of her innocence.
Elizabeth wrote letters that seemed full of generous frankness, perhaps were really so, despite the scratch in begging her to take ‘revenge on those who have done you
tel plaisir
, as most people say. Show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are.’
But her ignoble and disloyal cousin refused to avert suspicion by having even a few helpless commoners tortured, hanged and quartered. ‘Damned careless of you,’ was Bothwell’s comment, but his grin was admiring.
She broke out in sudden passion, ‘The whole world is ruled by hate. I’ll never submit to it. Do what they will, I will go my own way.’
‘One’s own way is the only way,’ he said.
Each had drawn a sword in challenge to the world, and knew they stood together against it.
That world was closing in on her, nearer and nearer. Once she had feared one old man spying down on her from his eyrie in Edinburgh. Now all those tall crooked houses were conspiring against her; there were faces peeping from behind the window-shutters instead of leaning out to gaze frankly on her, figures in doorways muttering suspicion. The very wind whispered and shrieked against her, scurrying round corners with its foul breath of middens and stale fish and blown onion skins and sour rags and
old men’s envious rage, screaming and hissing against what they might not enjoy.
No light had been thrown on the murder by the Board of Inquiry. Darkness took up the theme. A voice was heard in the streets at midnight, calling down vengeance on the murderer of the King; anonymous posters were pinned night after night on the Market Cross, on church doors, on the city gates, then even on the gates of Holyrood Palace.
They offered to disclose all, even the name of the writer, if the reward of £2,000 were immediately placed in the hands of an intermediary. They blackened more and more names; there were rough drawings of a man with a scar on his forehead, and beneath them the words, ‘Here is the murderer.’ Then came a drawing of an arm brandishing a sword, and above it the letters, very large, M. R.; a mermaid was shown luring her lovers down beneath the sea: Bothwell succeeded in tracing it to the hand of James Murray of Purdovis, the professional libeller who had spread slanders against him when he was exiled in France. But he had already made his escape, leaving behind him the most outspoken of all the libels: ‘Farewell, gentle Henry, but a vengeance on Mary.’
Lennox took up the publicity campaign and had a broadsheet circulated which pointed the undeniable truth:
The farther in filth ye stamp, no doubt
The fouler shall your shoes come out.
It also promised God’s vengeance for
The slaughter of that innocent lamb:
to which someone unkindly added a verse about the lamb’s father,
That bleating old bell-wether ram.
A Tragical Ballad of Earl Bothwell that found its way up by word of mouth from England told how
Lord Bothwell kept a privy watch
Underneath his castle wall,
and in reply to the young King’s cry for pity,
‘I’ll pity thee as much,’ he said,
‘And as much favour I’ll show to thee
As thou had on the Queen’s chamberlain
That day that thou doomed him to die.’
That Darnley’s murder had been in revenge for Rizzio’s, appealed strongly to the public’s sense of drama; it made tragedy simple and coherent, an artistic whole, and something they could all understand.
‘What the devil is this, my lord?’ asked one of his Hepburn kinsmen, ‘that everyone suspects you and cries a vengeance?’
They did not like the look of things. Was their lord, the strongest man now in Scotland, to be hounded to death by a pack of invisible foes? These voices at midnight, these verses, these painted papers found in the morning no one knew where next, it was not canny. And they were having effect on their master; he swore he would wash his hands in the blood of these poison-pen men, but he could not catch them any more than the birds that drop filth on one’s head.
His hand went too easily to his dagger these days. He kept a bodyguard of fifty round him – extravagant, so it seemed to his clansmen, who did not know all his reasons for it,.
For the Lord James had got in touch with Lennox, and the Protestant leaders were holding secret conclaves with the Catholics; it looked as if the heads of both the murder plots would now combine to use Darnley’s death as a means to ruin both Bothwell and the Queen. And from the Border he got word that Cecil’s spies were at work again, rounding up all those ‘who seem to mislike Bothwell’s greatness’. Worse, his enemies showed a dangerous amity. He was invited by Lord James to the dinner he gave to the English Envoy, and never had the Bastard shown
himself so genial to him. After that, it was no surprise to his guest to hear that assurances had been sent to England that ‘Bothwell and his accomplices should lose their lives ere mid-summer’.
Lennox was demanding the trial of those mentioned in the anonymous placards. Mary asked which, since there were so many inconsistent names, all ‘so different and contrarious’. Lennox chose out eight, with Bothwell at the head.
She showed his letter to Bothwell, who barely glanced at it, flung it on the table and said, ‘Tell him to come to the Tolbooth and prosecute me, and I’ll stand my trial as he asks. I’ll broach it to the Council tomorrow. Fifteen’ days’ notice have to be given’ (he was counting on his fingers, drumming them on the table). ‘What’s today? March 27th. That brings it to Saturday the 12th of April for the hearing.’
He drew himself up, squaring his shoulders with a sigh of relief. ‘By the faith of my body, it will be good to get down to it in the open, and get it over!’
‘But it will give all your enemies their opportunity,’ she cried. ‘They are certain to find their way into the jury, among the judges.’
‘Let ’em! I’ve got a fortnight to prepare my case.’
‘Who will help you? What legal advisers?’
‘I can’t tell you their names, for they’ll be a fair number. The Good Lord James showed the way last time he called me to trial two years ago, and packed the town with six thousand of his armed troops to support the verdict. This time it’s my turn. I can count on four thousand.’
Lennox had urged the utmost speed in justice, but now, on receiving notice of the Act of Council appointing Bothwell’s trial, signed, rather oddly among the other names, by Bothwell himself, he pleaded that he had not had sufficient time to prepare his charges. Two months since the murder seemed a fair time, but perhaps ‘charges’ signified supporters for he had only mustered three thousand as against Bothwell’s four.
More ominous still, his new ally Lord James suddenly found
that he wished to go abroad. He made his will, with surprising friendliness appointing Bothwell as secondary executor to Mary, and left Scotland for France via London, just three days before the date of the trial. Another ‘pregnant absence’? Lennox had some reason to fear it. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth to beg her to intercede for a postponement, and did not attend the trial himself.
Very early on the morning of April 12th a messenger from England, John Selby, arrived at Holyrood, sweating from the haste with which he had galloped with his guide since before dawn from Berwick. He bore a letter from his Queen which must be delivered at once to the Queen of Scots. The servants laughed at him; it was only six o’clock and the Queen still fast asleep. John Selby went to cool his heels in the Edinburgh streets and found them bristling with Hepburn pikes. The town was so full it was all but impossible to get breakfast at any tavern: there was no meat to be had, the Hepburns had snaffled the lot, and he had to make do with burnt porridge and coarse fish served half-cold.
Back he went to the Palace in a very bad temper about nine o’clock, and found the courtyard also full of Hepburns, men and horses, so full that he literally could not push his way through them, nor find anyone to take his letter into the Palace. They had guessed that his message was to postpone their master’s trial, and were not going to let him through if they could help it. Selby was furious, Selby was pompous (was he not Provost Marshal of Berwick?), but it was no use.
Then two men appeared in the doorway, the one tall and dark with a scar on his forehead, moving quick and impatient as he flung his cloak round him, the other slight, stooping, already huddled in his cloak; and at once all the lairds and gentry standing beside their horses sprang into the saddle. The guide told Selby that these two were Bothwell and Lethington; and the Provost Marshal, with a Herculean push, succeeded in getting through to them and once again explained his errand in a flood of outraged indignation.
‘Best wait until after the trial,’ was the brief comment of the
taller man; ‘the Queen won’t be able to attend to any business till then.’
‘But, my lord –!’ Selby checked. He couldn’t very well explain to the Earl of Bothwell that his errand was precisely to get that trial postponed so as to collect more evidence against him.
But that the Earl knew it was shown by his genial aside, not very low, to the guide: ‘So it’s you, Rushety you rascal – you ought to be hanged for bringing him here at an awkward moment like this.’
‘Your Honour knows well I had no choice but to guide him,’ Rushety pleaded without any great sign of alarm.
‘Guide him – why not? Guide him into a peat-hag if you’d any sense.’
Lethington laid a hand on Bothwell’s arm to stop these scarcely diplomatic passages. ‘Is your letter,’ he asked suavely of John Selby, ‘from the Council, or from the Queen of England herself?’
‘From the Queen’s own august hand.’
‘In that case, I will deliver it with my own obsequious hand,’ and Lethington took it into the Palace.
All the men waited in the saddle, their horses champed and fidgeted, eager to be off. Half an hour passed like an eternity to Bothwell.
Then Lethington reappeared, gracefully apologetic. The Queen had been, and still was, very ill; she was in a deep sleep and the doctor said she must not be disturbed; he feared it was unlikely that Selby would get any answer now before the trial, especially as this delay had already made the accused half an hour late for it. He mounted, turned his horse’s head, and looked up at the Palace with a smile as he took off his hat and bowed. There at an upper window was his wife, formerly Mary Fleming.
Bothwell followed his example, and at that moment the Queen appeared beside Fleming, and both the women smiled and nodded to him.
‘The Queen must have woken up,’ was Lethington’s blandly superfluous comment to the scandalized Mr Selby.
It was just like her not to care who saw her nor what was thought, Bothwell reflected, and with gratitude, for that sign of
goodwill heartened him greatly as he rode up towards the Tolbooth through the crowded streets.
A great noble going to his trial for the King’s murder was not a thing that happened every day. All the shops had stopped work, all the doors and windows were thronged with gaping faces, people were packed like herrings all the way up the outside staircases and on the roofs. They ought to cheer him for providing them with such entertainment. Once again the Gay Galliard, he turned in his saddle to see the pikes of his followers glittering in the April sunshine, rose in his stirrups and gave them a lusty cheer, which they answered in a roar like a breaking wave of the sea.
Then he asked Lethington, did the Queen know anything as yet of that business of the letter?
‘No,’ was the Secretary’s gentle answer. ‘It would only make for trouble to refuse the English Queen’s request to put off the trial. Elizabeth herself could hardly expect it when delivered, as is her wont, at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth moment. She has given her threat, or shall we call it “cousinly warning”, just too late, which was doubtless just what she’d intended.’
Bothwell gave a short but picturesque description of Elizabeth’s interference, but it did not relieve his feelings. Once again he was seeing the hand that he had kissed at Harrow-on-the Hill, the hand that had written this letter. Behind all the foes surrounding him and his Queen was this woman whom he knew to be more dangerous than all; and with her at this very moment was James, giving his account of Kirk o’ Field, of Mary and of Bothwell himself.
Lethington was being positively genial in his sly mocking way as he ambled along beside him on his palfrey (‘like a smug prelate’, in Bothwell’s irritable opinion) and assured him of the success of his trial. Success, that was the one hold he could have over such men. Let go of that and they would turn and rend him.
Inside the Tolbooth, stone-chill and dark, he looked on the faces of many such men. He knew Morton and Lindsay, whom he had outwitted after Rizzio’s murder, to be as really hostile to him as Lethington: the Lord Justice Argyll was no friend to him; John Hamilton was Arran’s brother and bore him a lifelong feud; Sandy
Ogilvie, a grudge for marrying his sweetheart Jean; Caithness was James’ new ally; he had quarrelled with Herries; Pitcairn, MacGill, Balnaves, Rothes and Boyle, Sempill and Forbes had all come up against him in the old troubles when they had worked for England and he for the Queen Regent. Not more than a third of those present were friendly or even neutral, and yet people were repeating Buchanan’s saying that the judges were ‘not chosen to judge but to acquit’, a lie flatly disproved by the list of their names.